The Devil's Code

’em.”
    C urrier lived in an apartment in Santa Cruz. Again, nobody home, and Bobby hadn’t been able to find a job for him. I checked with the manager, telling her that I was an old friend in the area for a day. “He’s gone to Mexico, on vacation,” she said.
    “When did he leave?”
    “Last week. He said he’d be gone for three weeks. Too bad you missed him.”
    N ow what?” LuEllen asked, as we walked away.
    “Back to Rufus. He’s three hours ahead of us—let’s see if Monger worked.”
    “What do you think about Currier?”
    “He might be running. He’s on the list; maybe he’s got reason to run.”
    “Like you.”
    “Like all of us.”
    M onger had worked. “A lot of the traffic was out of individual computers from about ten major sites—all colleges, all easy to get into,” Rufus said. “It looks like somebody went looking for online computers, planted a rumor message in a virus that dumped it into AOL message boards and other places like that. In the days before the rumors started, a lot of those ten sites had some extended traffic with a server in Laurel, Maryland.”
    “How much before the rumors started?”
    “Week or so. That’s about as far back as I can get, before the universe gets too large for Monger.”
    “A week or so.”
    “That’s what it looks like. Does this help?”
    “I have to think about it,” I said.
    B obby came back with some info about AmMath, and the guy who ran it.
    St. John Corbeil was a smart guy, a guy who quit the Marine Corps as a major and moved to the National Security Agency. He worked for the NSA for another five years, doing nothing that Bobby could find out about, except getting an advanced degree in software design. After a five-year hitch at NSA, he quit, moved to Dallas,and started his own high-tech encryption-products firm. He’d taken a half-dozen NSA encryption, math, and software specialists with him. The company had done well, coming along with its product line just at the beginning of the Internet boom. Corbeil was reasonably rich, with his ten percent of AmMath stock and his CEO’s spot.
    I don’t understand any of that encryption shit,” LuEllen said.
    “Like this,” I said. “Suppose you wanted to send me an Internet note that said, ‘Let’s sneak into Bill Gates’s house and steal his dog.’ If strong encryption is allowed, you could run the message through a software package—you’d just push a button—and it would be impossible for anybody to break. Anybody. Unless he had the key. No matter how hot-shit somebody else’s computers were, they couldn’t break it.”
    “But with the Clipper chip . . .”
    “There’d be two keys. I’d have one, and the government would have one. You could send the message, and I’d get it okay, but so would the government. If they were watching.”
    “We’d get to Bill Gates’s house and we’d find a whole bunch of cops waiting.”
    “And we’d be standing there with our dicks in our hands.”
    “Or a can of Alpo, in my case,” she said.
    J ack had had a small house in Santa Cruz, about a mile from Currier’s apartment. After he was killed, the FBI had gotten a warrant to go through the place, and Lane told them where to find the keys. The day after the funeral, she’d called to see if she could get back in, and the feds had no objection: they’d turned the place over, and had taken out everything that appeared to be computer-related, along with all his old phone bills, personal correspondence, and so on.
    While LuEllen and I were looking up Firewall names, Lane and Green had gone over to the house to look around, and to start cleaning up. That’s what Lane had called it. Cleaning up.
    What she meant was, throwing away anything that couldn’t be sold or given away. All the small pieces of a life—posters, notes, letters, unidentifiable photos; like that. Jack had never had children, so there was nobody to get it, except his sister; nobody to wonder who this ancestor had been, and to sit down in 2050 or 2100 and paw through the remains . . .
    When they got back, Green said, “Somebody was there before any of us. Somebody spread the lock on the back door.”
    “Gotta be the AmMath guys,” I said. “Maybe they’re happy, since they got the disks from you . . .”
    W hat’d you find out about Firewall?”
    Lane asked. “Nothing,” I said. I ran it down for her.
    “This guy who went to Mexico,” Green said. “He could have gone for more than one